In Guild wars 2 i had a lot of fun in pvp for the first few weeks. I will not forget having such a good time, even though i avoid the game now, i still respect it for the great time i had, but here is essentially how a battle went in the guild i was in which was the best guild (and hardest to stay in) on the server.

-Commander dialog-

"Everyone port back to the keep, group up and move west"

"Enemy group inbound, our recon force is taking the supply camp, lets cut these guys off"

"Run into them, go go go"

"Spam AOE, Guardians run around and pick people up when you can"

"Push into them! Everyone!"

"Well done, dont worry about the stragglers, go to the keep and set up on east wall"

"everyone stack together (within each other) on the wall and hit it while our healers AOE heal you"

"Push in! Dont stop pushing in, take out the players inside as a group"

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Thats pretty much it, at first you get hyped about running around with 100 other players and then you start to get really bored when the same technique works over and over, and when equal forces merge it just comes down to who has better AOE in the initial collide of forces. It's nothing more than cycling through three buttons and watching the screen light up, seriously becomes the most boring thing of all time.

I really wish ESO had rooted combat (Where you have to remain stationary when swinging/casting), and since it doesnt, the most powerful force in pvp will be heroes who can dash into large groups and spam aoe as they run in circles. Please realize this and keep AOE stuff either on a high cooldown, or very weak.

AOE is always going to be the ultimate meta strategy in these types of large scale PvP games, its just a fact.

The real test is if there is a COUNTER to the AOE or not.

TESO currently has several options for counters, that I'd rather not delve too deeply into because hey, strategy and [censored].

Negate magic counters it pretty well I'd think. Just to name one off the top of my head.

Yep! Negate Magic is ridiculously awesome.

Hmmm... Sounds like this game needs more AOE!

Does not rooted combat simply make you *more* vulnerable to hostile AOE?

Also, cooldown? There are very few cooldowns that I'm aware of.

There are NO cooldowns. At all.

To balance them out, AOE's have incredibly high casting costs compared to single target skills, and do much less damage. In a hilarious twist AOE is only useful in large groups of other people AOEing. :-p

Okay the thing is AOE is part of a strategy. The whole point of strategic pvp is to Adapt to the game mechanics. can we please wait to see how people counter/adapt to certain mechanics before calling for a nerf.

S'what I thought, but I was hedging against the possibility that I missed one somewhere